Junky

Burroughs' first novel, a largely autobiographical account of the constant cycle of drug dependency, cures, and relapses, remains the most unflinching, unsentimental account of addiction ever written. Through time spent kicking and time spent dealing, through junk sickness and a sanatorium, Junky is a field report from the American post-war drug underground. It has influenced generations of writers with its raw, sparse and unapologetic tone.

Queer

For more than three decades, while its writer's world fame increased, Queer remained unpublished because of its forthright depiction of homosexual longings. Set in the corrupt and spectral Mexico City of the '40s, Queer is the story of William Lee, a man afflicted with both acute heroin withdrawal and romantic and sexual yearnings for an indifferent user named Eugene Allerton. The narrative is punctuated by Lee's outrageous "routines" - brilliant comic monologues that foreshadow Naked Lunch - yet the atmosphere is heavy with foreboding.

On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition

Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On the Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac's classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be "beat" and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets, and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that "set them free".

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks

More than 60 years ago, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, two novice writers at the dawn of their careers, sat down to write a novel about the summer of 1944, when one of their friends killed another in a moment of brutal and tragic bloodshed. Alternating chapters, they pieced together a hard-boiled tale of bohemian New York during World War II, full of drugs and obsession, art and violence.

Ham on Rye: A Novel

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years, and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

In Las Vegas to cover a motorcycle race, Raoul Duke (Thompson) and his attorney Dr. Gonzo (inspired by a friend of Thompson) are quickly diverted to search for the American dream. Their quest is fueled by nearly every drug imaginable and quickly becomes a surreal experience that blurs the line between reality and fantasy. But there is more to this hilarious tale than reckless behavior, for underneath the hallucinogenic facade is a stinging criticism of American greed and consumerism.

On the Road: The Original Scroll

Though Jack Kerouac began thinking about the novel that was to become On the Road as early as 1947, it was not until three weeks in April 1951 that he wrote the first full draft that was satisfactory to him. Typed out as one long, single-spaced paragraph on eight long sheets of tracing paper that he later taped together to form a 120-foot scroll, this document is among the most significant, celebrated, and provocative artifacts in contemporary American literary history.

Big Sur

"Big Sur's a humane, precise account of the extraordinary ravages of alcohol delirium tremens on Kerouac, a superior novelist who had strength to complete his poetic narrative, a task few scribes so afflicted have accomplished...others crack up. Here we meet San Francisco's poets and recognize hero Dean Moriarty 10 years after On the Road. Jack Kerouac was a 'writer,' as his great peer W.S. Burroughs says, and here at the peak of his suffering humorous genius he wrote through his misery to end with 'Sea,' a brilliant poem appended, on the hallucinatory sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur." - Allen Ginsberg

Call Me Burroughs: A Life

In Call Me Burroughs, biographer and Beat historian Barry Miles presents the first full-length biography of Burroughs to be published in a quarter century - and the first one to chronicle the last decade of Burroughs's life and examine his long-term cultural legacy.

Written with the full support of the Burroughs estate and drawing from countless interviews with figures like Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, and Burroughs himself, Call Me Burroughs is a rigorously researched biography that finally gets to the heart of its notoriously mercurial subject.

Cities of the Red Night: The Red Night Trilogy, Book 1

From one of the founders of the beat generation and the 1960s counterculture comes this opening novel of a series available now in audio for the first time. An opium addict is lost in the jungle; young men wage war against an empire of mutants; a handsome young pirate faces his execution; and the world's population is infected with a radioactive epidemic. These stories are woven together in a single tale of mayhem and chaos.

Post Office: A Novel

"It began as a mistake." By middle age, Henry Chinaski has lost more than 12 years of his life to the U.S. Postal Service. In a world where his three true, bitter pleasures are women, booze, and racetrack betting, he somehow drags his hangover out of bed every dawn to lug waterlogged mailbags up mud-soaked mountains, outsmart vicious guard dogs, and pray to survive the day-to-day trials of sadistic bosses and certifiable coworkers.

Women: A Novel

Low-life writer and unrepentant alcoholic Henry Chinaski was born to survive. After decades of slacking off at low-paying dead-end jobs, blowing his cash on booze and women, and scrimping by in flea-bitten apartments, Chinaski sees his poetic star rising at last. Now, at 50, he is reveling in his sudden rock-star life, running three hundred hangovers a year, and maintaining a sex life that would cripple Casanova.

The Dharma Bums

Two ebullient young men are engaged in a passionate search for dharma, or truth. Their major adventure is the pursuit of the Zen way, which takes them climbing into the high Sierras to seek the lesson of solitude - a lesson that has a hard time surviving their forays into the pagan groves of San Francisco's bohemia, with its marathon wine-drinking bouts, poetry jam sessions, experiments in "yabyum", and other non-ascetic pastimes.

Factotum

One of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next.

Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas author Hunter S. Thompson rocked the literary world with his mind-bending style of Gonzo journalism. First published in 1966, Hell’s Angels is Thompson’s up-close and personal look at the infamous motorcycle gang during the time when its moniker was most feared.

Wild Boys

In this funny, nightmarish masterpiece of imaginative excess, grotesque characters engage in acts of violent one-upmanship, boundless riches mangle a corner of Africa into a Bacchanalian utopia, and technology, flesh, and violence fuse with and undo each other. A fragmentary, freewheeling novel, it sees wild boys engage in vigorous, ritualistic sex and drug taking, as well as prankster-ish guerrilla warfare and open combat with a confused and outmatched army.

Tropic of Capricorn

Banned in America for almost 30 years because of its explicit sexual content, this companion volume to Miller's Tropic of Cancer chronicles his life in 1920s New York City. Famous for its frank portrayal of life in Brooklyn's ethnic neighborhoods and Miller's outrageous sexual expolits, Tropic of Capricorn is now considered a cornerstone of modern literature.

The Soft Machine: The Restored Text: The Nova Trilogy, Book 1

In The Soft Machine, William S. Burroughs begins an adventure that will take us into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo. Continuing his ferocious verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy, and addiction in all its forms, Burroughs gives us a surreal space odyssey through the wounded galaxies in a book only he could create.

Hollywood

Bukowski's alter ego, Henry Chinaski, returns, revelling in his eternal penchant for booze, women, and horse-racing as he makes the precarious journey from poet to screenwriter. Based on Bukowski's experiences when working on the film Barfly, the absurdity and egotism of the film industry are laid bare in this deadpan, touching, and funny glimpse into the endless negotiations and back-stabbings of la-la land. Hollywood is an irreverent jaunt that serves up the beating heart of Hollywood with razor-sharp humour.

Gravity's Rainbow

Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.

The Place of Dead Roads: The Red Night Trilogy, Book 2

This surreal fable, set in America's Old West, features a cast of notorious characters: the Crying Gun, who breaks into tears at the sight of his opponent; the Priest, who goes into gunfights giving his adversaries the last rites; and the Nihilistic Kid himself, Kim Carsons, a homosexual gunslinger who, with a succession of beautiful sidekicks, sets out to challenge the morality of small-town America and fight for intergalactic freedom.

A Clockwork Orange

A vicious 15-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic, a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. In Anthony Burgess' nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology.

Slaughterhouse-Five

Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).

The Naked and the Dead

Hailed as one of the finest novels to come out of the Second World War, The Naked and the Dead received unprecedented critical acclaim upon its publication and has since become part of the American canon. This fiftieth anniversary edition features a new introduction created especially for the occasion by Norman Mailer.

Publisher's Summary

Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the 20th century, a book that redefined not just literature but American culture.

This is an unnerving tale of a narcotics addict unmoored in New York, Tangiers, and, ultimately, a nightmarish wasteland known as Interzone. The restored text includes many editorial corrections and incorporates Burroughs's notes on the text and several essays he wrote over the years about the book. For the Burroughs enthusiast and neophyte alike, this is a valuable and fresh experience of this classic of our culture.

What the Critics Say

"William was a Shootist. He shot like he wrote - with extreme precision and no fear." (Hunter S. Thompson, Rolling Stone)"A masterpiece. A cry from hell, a brutal, terrifying, and savagely funny book that swings between uncontrolled hallucination and fierce, exact satire." (Newsweek)

Today I started listening to this again as I was re-organizing my audio library, couldn't shut it off, and was shocked to realize that I didn't review this when I first heard it. About the book: It will horrify a significant portion of the population. It is full of brutality, filth, pedophilia, profanity, etc. If you don't know what you are getting into, beware. At its best, it is brilliant satire. I give the story one star because there is no story, but there is not supposed to be. The book will more many of those readers that it doesn't offend. It contains some tedious repetition, and passages that could probably only be interesting if one is as wasted on drugs as the author was when he wrote it. It also contains many brilliantly inspired passages and images that have endured through the years.

The thing that kept me listening again today is the narration. Every narration is necessarily just one interpretation of a book, and Bramhall puts a unique stamp on this one. His voice is a drawl, I suppose spun off of Burroughs' own, but much more extreme. You might like it or you might not, but I found his style enjoyable when I got used to it. The best part of it is the voices that he gives to the various characters. These interpretations are brilliant and hilarious.

I do most of my reading at bedtime, and was unable to finish reading this book because it gave me nightmares (as it reportedly did to Jack Kerouac when he helped transcribe the original text). The audiobook let me get through it during my commute. It made me forget the work day.

The audiobook is highly recommended to those who understand what they are in for.

The extraordinary prose seems to be stream of conscious recollections and fantasies of a brilliant writer/junkie who has seen the filthiest & most degrading underbelly of a drug addicts world mixed with at times vulgar, at times erotic and at times horribly sadistic sexual apparitions. After listening to three hours of the book I couldn't find the connective threads of a story. The narrator couldn't be better. He reads the material as if he has lived it but I need a story to sustain ten hours of listening.

This was an incredible thing...and I still don't know if I love it or hate it. I know that I couldn't stop listening to it.

Burroughts is clearly an amazing writer and the book just flows from one area to the next but the story itself is hard to wrap your head around. I don't think that you can fully understand unless you have been trapped it the claws of addictions.

I am really glad I listened and I will probably listen to it again just to try to digest more of the shocking and often disgusting story.

This book is like watching a high speed train wreck in slow motion! You want to turn away because of the suffering and depravity you witness but somehow this book being read to you force feeds you in a way that sight reading can't.

It struck me that if I read this book instead of listening to it, I would have missed the passion and message. The pictures Burroughs paints for us are so vivid and horrifying that if I were to read it I might turn away. But having it read to you, you have no choice but to sit there and take it though a few times I had to keep from running off the road!

It is not to be missed simply because you find out that the band Steely Dan took this book as inspiration for their name.

Granted, there will be people who object to the homophobia. Others will object to the drug addiction. Still others, to the utter amorality. Then, there will be those who object to all the profanity. I find Burroughs prose to be almost lyrical. The narration is dead on perfect for the main character and really pulled me into the novel. If you want a novel with a linear plot, you won't like The Naked Lunch. You could pull the chapters out and mix them up and read them in just about any order. Just as an addict losing focus and returning to reality, The Naked Lunch shifts through time and space. If you want some memorable vignettes about the human condition (in an R. Crumb comix kind of way), this novel will deliver.

I become as addicted to this audio book as much as the characters it was about! One of the most brilliant things I have listened to in a long time. The narration weaves an almost hallucinogenic series of vignettes that takes you to all these wacky places. It sucks you in and doesn't let up until is it over. I couldn't turn it off!!!! You could literally start with any chapter and play in any order. I am going to have fun with this one in a my library for a very long time. It was as prophetic today as when it was written in 1959. Predicting a sexual epidemic such as AIDS that would consume and ravish our culture. It's almost like you can feel it's throbbing pulse through every syllable uttered. Not for everyone has strong graphic episodes that become quite numbing!

For a long time this book has been on my reading list.I am glad I approached it as an audible book, because I think the prose really lends itself to a performance piece.This is not a book with a beginning, middle and end. This is a stream of conscientiousness that is semi autobiographical.The author was addicted to heroin at the time of writing. Legend has it he took all of his work and cut it to pieces then re-joined the papers in random order.I love this book for the authors sheer audacity and dexterity with the English language.Now I know what all the hype was about.The Narrator Mark Bramhall was perfect for this book.

This one starts off cool and powerful, with fantastic narration, but of the 10 hrs here, nearly 4 is composed of letters by the author, and about the book, telling you basically "Naked Lunch: him good medicine. Him you need. Powerful experience." Now, this is worth a look, but even of the little material here, much is redundant, often word for word repeatings, and there is no flow, little story, or point. Much of the material is psychotic, perverted, and pornographic, which is not as much fun as it would be if it did not involve 10 year old boys and murder, though if you like original ideas and images, then if nothing else, this may offer a very twisted nightmare. The author's angry explaination that these sexual murder scenes of little boys are to show how wrong capital punishment is seems forced at best. Get ready to read the following words at least five times per page: boy, junk, junkie, sick, needle, and 20 forms of genitalia and sexual abuse. Oh yeah and everyone messes their pants at least once per page. As for writing, some of it is very unique and strong and even mind-blowing, but every experience boils down to sex or injection, and most of the material was written down while hallucinating on drugs. Then the author met the Beat writers and got their special brand of macho world-changing confidence where anything he did must be the most important thing ever...not really. It is far less structured or normal than the movie, if you have seen that. Be very open minded or you won't last, and as for importance, well it seems not so much to be interested in exposing drugs as awful as making them seem cool, or at least, creating an authentic drug-free trip-out experience, which is achieved. But as far as that goes, what a boring gross world drug tripping is presented as. Why would anyone keep putting themself through this kind of imagery for years and years?

If it were based solely on my enjoyment of the book, I would give it one star overall. But recognizing its influence, the exceptional reading of the audio book by Mark Bramhall, and the extras at the end of this addition (like Burroughs' discussions on addiction), I give it three stars.

Now... I must immediately read something light and entertaining to offset the darkness of Naked Lunch!

To enjoy this book I had to let go of the concept of following a story and simply revel at the stunning imagery invoked by the insane streams of descriptive prose. I found I could listen for about an hour in a sitting and then have to take a pause and sift through the broken images stuffed into my head. I have to say, not all of them were pretty images.I found it hard to imagine this book being written in the late 50's and easy to imagine it causing a moral outrage. I can see how the book split people into two camps and understand people finding it offensive, however, I fall into the camp of people who saw a dark beauty in it. It has some of the most amazing descriptive scenes I can ever remember reading.I will read it again and have more Burroughs on my wish list.

8 of 8 people found this review helpful

Joe de Swardt

8/20/09

Overall

"Exquisitely written filth"

The perfect antidote to the American stereo-type. Far from God fearing, clean cut and family valued pre-sixties America, the Naked Lunch explores the far out other extreme of drugs, sex and human depravity. Don't let this put you off!!! It is written in such an exquisite manner that I found myself recoiling at the subject matter but marvelling in the art of writing. The Naked Lunch is one of the most beautifully written and one of the the most depraved of books. Masterpiece of language, filth written art and very funny. The dichotomy split my mind time and again and I thoroughly enjoyed the master crafting that managed to mess so much with my head. Get it!!

5 of 5 people found this review helpful

ReadingWild

England

7/8/13

Overall

Performance

Story

"There's out there and then there's NAKED LUNCH"

What made the experience of listening to Naked Lunch the most enjoyable?

The virtually unreadable book becomes an incredibly entertaining experience as an audio book - this edition with notes and history is utterly fascinating - and still...out there alone and not giving a hoot!

Who was your favorite character and why?

A book of utterly awful, despicable and thoroughly amusing characters

Which scene did you most enjoy?

The bit with the baboon - although I can't tell you why?

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The info about his own personal drug history is very insightful and throws a sharp light on current official drug policy

Any additional comments?

I read the book years ago and really didn't get it and if you're of a certain age you may be aware of the film - this recording knocks that into a hat and the book benefits greatly from being read.

3 of 3 people found this review helpful

Dan Dan

UK

7/20/13

Overall

Performance

Story

"Didn't get it."

I absolutely loved Junkie, I smashed the book in 2 days. I was really looking forward to Naked Lunch, however I found it very difficult to follow and it didn't hold my attention. I found it really lacked narrative and what story there was, I didn't really follow.I found it a bit of a chore, not for me!

2 of 3 people found this review helpful

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